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Monday, August 02, 2010

Menu Plan Monday

Last week, I mentioned that I was in the midst of creating a 4 week meal plan complete with shopping lists. Well, the meal plan itself went rather quickly. The shopping list part is a bit more tedious as it involves getting all my recipes together. It will be great to have my recipes compiled in one place once I'm done, though.

I went ahead and did the shopping list for the first week and will work on one a week until 4 weeks are completed. I plan to use these meal plans over and over so the extra effort is definitely worth it!

Already, I've tweaked the meal plan for this week to make it fit with time and budget restraints. But overall, I think we will like this plan and we'll see how it works long-term. This week's shopping trip was a breeze since I had it all listed out ahead of time.

Breakfasts are the same few things repeated each week. Lunches are leftovers, sandwiches or something very quick and easy. For suppers, we're doing a bean night, a meatless night(focusing mainly on egg or cheese as the main protein), a meat night(our favorite!), a sandwich and/or salad night, breakfast for dinner and the infamous 'other' category one night. I don't usually cook on Sunday nights; we eat a big noon meal and then just dig around for a little something once we are finally hungry again.:-) This is how we typically eat and it works well for us. Dividing it up into categories really simplified the planning process as well. I just went through my mental recipe file, my cookbooks and asked my husband for input and quickly plugged 4 meals into each category.

I'll certainly change things up with the seasons, but this will be a huge help in these very busy next few months.